On Halloween night, 2003, a young boy named Vincent Ledvina is walking home after a cold midwestern evening of trick-or-treating. He looks up and sees something bright and green shimmering across the sky. “Is that the aurora?” he asks his parents. They aren’t sure. But young Ledvina, having seen the wonders of the upper atmosphere with his own eyes for the first time, is hooked.

Now a second-year Ph.D. student in Space Physics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Ledvina studies the aurora borealis. He is working to understand the intricacies of these beautiful—and even life-changing—natural phenomena using both NASA and citizen-sourced data. 

Mack Hughes defended his thesis on March 5th, titled “Direct and cascading effects of sea star wasting on rocky intertidal communities.”

In 2013 and 2014, sea star wasting caused a mass mortality event on the coasts from Alaska to Mexico. This phenomenon decimated many populations, affecting twenty species of sea stars.

Lia Ferguson is a third-year graduate student pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction at UAF. Her thesis, a work of prose entitled I’m Riding My Bike in the Dark, is set to be defended this semester. I was lucky enough to talk to Lia recently about her work, writing, and journey to UAF.

Marine Bagnoud is an exchange student from Switzerland studying moose behavior. She is combining her own field data with crowdsourced videos of moose to gain a better understanding of their habits.

Angela Linn defended her Ph.D. dissertation “Preserving Reflections of Ourselves: The Past, Present, and Future of Alaska’s Museums” in October 2023. Read more to learn about her work on the history and future of museums in Alaska.

Isaac Van Flein’s M.S. thesis examines mouse behavior in models of OCD and Autism.

On Monday, March 20th, 2023, biologist Alex Cornwell successfully defended his M.S. thesis entitled “The role of cystathionine γ-lyase and hydrogen sulfide in glucose transporter GLUT1 expression in macrophages.” His project takes an in-depth look at cellular mechanisms to better understand the role of hydrogen sulfide in immune processes.

We got the chance to sit in on Jessie Christian’s M.S. Thesis defense in Geoscience on Friday morning, February 24th, 2023. Her research project, entitled, “Citizen Science: Shoreline Change Monitoring in Southwest Alaska,” took her to two sites in Dillingham and Chignik Bay where she collected data alongside coastal communities to monitor shoreline erosion and add to our understanding of the effects of climate change.

Akashia Martinez successfully defended her Biological Sciences M.S. thesis titled "Kit-rearing in the far north: Movement behavior and activity patterns of female Canada lynx (Lynx canadensis) during the denning season." Her study is part of the Northwest Boreal Forest Lynx Project, which combines efforts here at UAF with research from the National Park Service and U.S. Fish & Wildlife, with the overall goal of providing a better understanding of the relationship between two important species, Canada lynx and their favorite prey, snowshoe hares. Akashia’s impressively thorough work movement behavior and activity pattern of denning mothers provides an important piece of the lynx-research puzzle.

February 16, 2023, Geoscientist Jordan Jenckes successfully defended his dissertation entitled “Variability of Hydrogeochemistry and Chemical Weathering Regimes in High Latitude Glacierized Coastal Catchments.” This is the culmination of four years of research, including field work and data analysis, in the Gulf of Alaska watershed.

Exploring Xochiyolloh Harbison’s thesis exhibition Hysterical and what it has to say about the tampon tax in the United States.

Lauren Sutton is a marine biologist from Washington, who recently defended her Ph.D. Dissertation studying Arctic Epibenthic Communities. She is now a research coordinator at the Kachemak Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve in Homer, Alaska.